In the residential real estate industry, an obvious and major part of marketing a home for sale is the physical showing of property to a potential buyer by a sales broker or agent. If the owner is at home, entry can be readily achieved without the broker or agent needing a key.
In the vast majority of showings, the owner is not at home. The real estate agent has to somehow obtain a key. A key can be obtained from the listing broker to show the house. The key then has to be returned. This takes time and a great amount of effort. It presents a substantial logistics problem, time wise, to real estate brokers. It is this effort, known as "key chasing," which needs to be eliminated, or measurably reduced.
Lock boxes or key safes now exist which house keys to a particular home offered for sale. The lock box is attached to the residence to allow a real estate agent to take a customer directly to the property. The lock box is unlocked with a special key issued to the agent. The house key can then be removed from the lock box and used to gain access to the property. A known type of lock box is illustrated, in U.S. Pat. No. 3,436,937 issued to Barrett.
With regard to known, key operated lock boxes, it is necessary for the key to be widely distributed. Typically, all of the agents in a given Real Estate Board would have a master key that unlocks all of the boxes used within the area of that Board. The number of keys in circulation might range from 20 to 400. As a result, the listing agent has little knowledge or control over whether the property is entered, when it is entered or by whom.
The broker is unable to report to the client as to the extent of interest in the property that he has been able to generate. Further, the large number of keys in circulation causes both the listing broker and the client to have concern for the security of the property.
Combination lock key boxes partially eliminate these problems if the internal combination is set to a new value each time the lock is installed at a different property. In this case, an agent wishing to enter a given property must communicate with the listing broker to determine the combination in use at a given property.
However, for subsequent entries to the same property, the agent already knows the combination and need not check with the listing broker to reenter. In addition, the combination for a given property is readily passed to other persons. Of course, these problems could be circumvented if the listing broker changed the combination after each time that the property was entered. This is an impractical solution however. This solution would entail as much work as the key "chasing."
While the use of lock boxes is convenient and does eliminate "key chasing," it does not afford the owner or his agent desirable control and information. If the residence was shown in the owner's absence, it may not be possible to determine who showed the property and when. Because known lock boxes fail to provide this information, and additionally raises security questions in owner's minds, many real estate offices prefer not to use the lock box as it now exists. This, creates, by necessity, the logistical problem of "key chasing."
There thus continues to be a need for lock boxes or key safes which provide ready access to the stored key but which control initial access as well as repeated access by one or more parties to the stored key. Further, there continues to be a need for a key safe which can be opened without the need of a special key but still has the aforementioned access control capabilities.